Mawwiage

It's no wonder that with my pending nuptials, I've had weddings on the brain lately. William and Kate only exacerbated my obsessions, but I have to admit that I've had a lovely time planning our wedding.

As the countdown ticks away (three weeks or so), my thoughts are not only circling weddings, but marriage itself. This is a tricky subject, and everyone has their own opinion on what makes a successful marriage and how this type of partnership should work. Coming from a divorced family, I've had serious worries about how to make sure mine is a marriage that will withstand the test of time. Dear comes from a parentage that only ended when his mom sadly passed away from Pancreatic Cancer -- two days shy of their 42nd wedding anniversary. When confronted with my endless questions of what is marriage, how to make it work and why the hell do we do it in the first place, I decided I needed to do some research.

I asked a couple of friends for advice on their marriages, especially in the early stages (since my friends that ARE married are all under the 5-year mark) and it quickly became apparent that -- duh -- every couple is different. Every couple deals with arguments, hard times, groceries, chores, and splitting up family holidays completely differently. As much as I appreciated the advice I was getting, I realized that I was curious as to WHY people get married nowadays. Why, in the day and age that it's much more widely accepted to have kids, live together, do everything you would normally do while being married without actually getting married: why do we keep doing this? Yes, it's nice to have the tax breaks and a big blowout party with all your friends and loved ones ... but the average wedding costs between $27,000 - $30,000, and that's a LOT of money to spend on one day. So why do we do it?

There's a man named John Gottman who has made a bit of a name for himself in couples counseling. He and his wife (another marriage counselor type) claim that they can predict, with up to 90% accuracy, whether or not a marriage will end in divorce, simply by observing a couple, any couple, for 15 minutes. I was recommended a copy of his Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, and it contains some good advice for couples who are new or established. He has some great exercises that are all about getting to know each other, how to speak to each other during arguments, and pitfalls to avoid. John Gray's Mars and Venus Together Forever was also helpful in describing how a man's mind is different from a woman's mind, but tends to repeat itself and it reads like it's dumbing down clinical speak (which I suppose it is).

By far, the best book I have read on this subject (and I'll admit: I'm probably not done yet) is Committed: A Love Story, by Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame). A woman at a knit group recommended this to me, and I jumped at it because I Eat, Pray, Love was one of the best books I've read in a long time. This book is a follow-up where Liz and Felipe (the dreamy Brazilian man she falls in love with at the end of EPL) are faced with the one thing they agreed they never wanted to do: get married. Felipe hits a snag with US Customs and the only way he'll be allowed back into America is if he and Liz get hitched. They have to travel around for a while while his immigration status goes through the leagues and depths of bureaucracy, and Liz takes this time to do research (ha! Irony, that is) on marriage to try to make her peace with it. It's an incredibly well-written book and while it doesn't offer suggestions for how to handle your own marriage, it does contain a history, and general thoughts on the subject itself (including expectation, autonomy, ceremony, and others).

I've found a few other books that talk about this subject (a few? Try hundreds), and while I still want to keep reading up on the subject, I also think I need to take a break. Reading all these books about it only makes me overthink things, and I'm already a worrier ... so now that we're on the edge of the three-week countdown, I'm thinking that it would be much less stressful if I put my energy towards letting it ride ... I've made my decision, and I couldn't be happier with it. I love my Dear, and I'm so thrilled and lucky to be able to marry my sweetheart. To me, he's the most heartbreakingly handsome man in any room, and there aren't too many people who can make me laugh as hard. We have a great partnership, and we have everything that we need to take the next leap of faith. I'm tying on my Dear-shaped parachute and venturing forth.

Watermelon Gazpacho

I've been trying to make some new goals for myself. Small goals that are easily obtainable and I'm hoping will make differences in several different aspects of my life. One of these I mentioned earlier: eating a little more locally. This can sometimes be difficult, but so far I feel like I've at least managed to make some healthy and delicious meals for myself and Dear. This will probably become even easier as the summer progresses and the Farmers Markets get more stocked and my own garden starts generating (or even ... once I get it planted).

Another goal that I've set is to make at least one vegetarian meal a week. I figure this will help Dear and I save a little on expensive produce (especially produce that's chockfulla hormones and who knows what else) and try out new recipes to boot. I've started reading a couple blogs that promote vegetarian eating, and there are some really great recipes to be found (check out my friend and fellow Purchase alum, The Cozy Herbivore).

This week, I tried a recipe that I had a few years ago and have just never made myself: Watermelon Gazpacho. This is a fairly simple and tasty recipe, served cold like the traditional Gazpacho. It's a great kick-off to summer, and even better in the dead heat of Midsummer, taking advantage of all sorts of different flavors. Be forewarned: there is a LOT of chopping that goes into this. You might be most comfortable pulling a chair up to your counter, or setting a few towels down on the table and sitting while you chop. The messiest part is the juicy watermelon and tomatoes, but other than that, it's super easy! Beware of the serrano pepper, too -- it can burn your skin. I wore clean dishgloves while I chopped mine, but you can use regular rubber gloves from the cleaning aisle, as long as they are CLEAN. Please use common sense -- don't use the rubber gloves you scrubbed the toilet with over the weekend, for the love of Pete.


Watermelon Gazpacho

8 c seedless watermelon (about 1 1/2 of the tiny watermelons)
4 c tomato (about six or seven in total)
4 large avocados
1 cucumber
1 serrano pepper, seeded
2 T olive oil
Salt and Pepper to taste

Put 7 cups of the watermelon and 3 1/2 cups of the tomatoes into a blender and puree until smooth. Transfer puree into a large bowl using a fine mesh strainer to separate the solids. Press as much of the solids through as will go, then throw the rest out.

Finely chop the remaining ingredients and toss them in with the pureed watermelon and tomato mess. Add salt and pepper to taste, and stir gently. Cover and refrigerate at least one hour before serving. Garnish with feta or goat cheese and fresh dill.

Enjoy!

William and Katherine

I have to admit, I'm horribly excited to watch Prince William and soon-to-be Princess Katherine get hitched at the end of this week.

I had a huge unrequited crush on Prince William during my formative years (what red-blooded straight girl couldn't love the blond-haired, blue-eyed poster boy for Prince Charming?), and I think Kate Middleton is effortlessly classy and elegant. I love what she's done for hats over the last few years, and I cannot wait to see her outfits for decades to come.

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- some of my excitement is also because my own nuptials are counting down, and I'm doing my absolute damndest to be a pretty pretty princess in my own right.

But I mean, come on -- who doesn't love the pomp and circumstance that goes along with a royal wedding? Granted, the pomp is definitely more appreciated by those of us who don't have to pay for it in taxes, but we have our own pomp we're taxed for. So there.

In short, raise a cuppa to William and Katherine. May their marriage be filled with years of loveliness and laughter, the same as I would wish for any newlyweds (myself included). And I hope Katherine doesn't mind if I use her as modern-day inspiration for effortless dignity and grace.

Living la Vie da Local

I've been really gearing up for the Farmer's Market season. One of the things I was really excited for moving to Colorado is that people here seem to be a little more environmentally conscious (vs. the oil-driven-everything's-bigger-in-Texas mentality). Not that there's anything wrong with Texans, heavens no -- I really enjoyed the years that I lived there. But I love the idea of a place that it's easy to ride your bike along the street (Fort Collins has a bike lane on pretty much every street in town) and find locally grown produce.

It's not uncommon to meet folks around here who have a few alpaca, or maybe even goats. My favorite yarn shop in town, My Sister Knits, has a chicken coop in the back yard with five or six egg-laying chickens.

I mentioned before that I've become more interested in eating healthy, and I've had a growing interest in buying locally. May starts the Farmer's Market season, and I cannot wait to see what's in store for us this summer. There are several around Fort Collins, and one actually started last week but only had about six stalls and not very much produce. It's still very early for anything grown in the ground, and I've been using the time to read up on what else I can do throughout the year.

I've been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (her name might seem familiar from her massively popular and very good Poisonwood Bible). It's a really well-written book about Barbara and her family living locally for one full year. If they can't grow it themselves or get it from a neighbor, they go without. They share recipes, tricks, secrets, history and details about the food industry that I had heard about, but never read in print before. (I imagine a lot of the same details are reported in movies like Food, Inc. and the like, but I have refrained from watching those movies for personal reasons.) She makes it seem manageable to do such a task, at least on a small scale. I do not have the land space to make a garden the size of hers, and I cannot keep my own chickens at the moment, but I can shop at more Farmer's Markets (now that they're open) and buy organic when I can. It is more expensive, yes, and even certified organics can be tricky. But I like the idea of having fresh food and supporting local businesses, and around here it doesn't seem so hard to do that more often. It's no longer a secret how the food industry treats animals that are being raised for mass meat production, or the chemicals they spray to kill bugs, or antibiotics they add to food that didn't need it 15 years ago. It will take some time and effort to convince major food corporations that we don't want that shit in our food or our bodies. I'm not going to spend a bunch of time preaching about this, but (as with most things) all it takes is a wee bit of effort from everyone -- or even a few more people every year -- and maybe we can make some big changes for the better.

Some Food Stuffs ....

I have been trying to eat healthier lately, for several reasons. Reason #1 is because our wedding is now 56 days away (I know the day count thanks to our Macy's Registry countdown clock ... masochists) and I've been trying for six months to trim down. I've lost 10 pounds, which is really great -- but I've been plateau'd at the same weight for the last two months. After four weeks, I got horribly frustrated and ignored my diet, gaining and losing the same two pounds -- despite my better efforts -- for the next four weeks. Now that we're down to less than two months, I'm trying again with renewed effort. I'll be happy with another five pounds gone, but will of course accept more.

Reason #2 is because it's just a good idea in general. We're doing really well at eating healthy at home (not so great when we go out, but we have done well with cutting back the amount that we eat out), and that's given me the motivation to start trying new recipes. I want to start trying at least one vegetarian option every week, and tonight is the first attempt (to be reported on later). I made a vegetable barley casserole last week that I thought was an entree -- but then I read the recipe closer and realized it was a side dish. It was very tasty, though, and could easily become an entree if you add your favorite meat-of-choice.

It's about two cups of cooked barley, and I added fresh onion and green pepper, as well as frozen spinach and corn. It was REALLY good, and I can only imagine that it's better when all the veggies are fresh.

I'm rather excited that I have some sproutlings coming up, too!! These are my snapdragons:
Super tiny. We're supposed to get rain all through this week, so I'm hoping the weather stays warm enough that they don't freeze. I also have a couple of teeny tiny chives poking their heads up, and exactly one basil sprout. Hooray for home-grown herbs!! We'll get the garden ready in the next couple weeks, and I'm hoping to plant right around Mother's Day, when we are hopefully far and away from snow season in Colorado.

I have to admit, I'm loving springtime in Colorado. When it rains here, it actually smells like rain. It's delightfully refreshing and I didn't realize how much I missed it until I smelled it again. Springtime in Houston is a fleeting time of year, and when it rains it tends to smell like humidity and mildew. I much prefer the smell here.

Llamas, Alpacas and Crias, oh my!

About six months ago (has it really been that long? Pretend I didn't say that), I convinced Dear that we had to go to the Alpaca Festival in Loveland, CO. I wanted to go simply because I think the animals are cute and I knew there would be a bunch of them, and I figured it would be a great place to score some alpaca roving to spin up. I was right on both counts, but what I had not expected was that we would end the afternoon discussing whether or not we would want to keep a small herd of these animals someday.

Ever since then, I've been playing with the idea of finding an alpaca ranch somewhere nearby that I could volunteer and learn a little more about the business and the animals themselves. I finally got around to doing that, and Dear and I drove up this past Sunday to Happy Critter Farms to meet Carolyn and her herd of alpacas and llamas.

Carolyn and I had been emailing in the days leading up to our visit, so I knew that she had been nursing a preemie cria that was not bonding with its mother. She is yet unnamed and is still day-to-day, but what a sweetheart.

We learned a lot from Carolyn in the mere hour and a half we were there, and I'm looking forward to visiting more with her in the future. Besides the new cria, we got to meet Brownie and feed him some treats.

This is Brownie with Flat Stanley, a school project for our nephew. Flat Stanley was squashed flat as a pancake by a bulletin board and is now being mailed around the country and wants photos taken of his adventures. We thought Flat Stanley would like meeting some alpacas, and we weren't wrong!

We also tried to go to a Pygora goat shearing in town, but we missed the shearing by mere moments. However, the goats were cute and obviously quite itchy after being shorn. Can't say I blame her, but it was kind of cute to see her chewing herself and scratching up against anything vaguely textured (the fence, the wood post, their pen).

I have a few other blog posts that are brewing in my little ol' head, so I'll leave those for another day. Happy Alpaca Farming!

Little Seedlings

Spring has definitely sprung here in Colorado. The trees are starting to bud, tulip beds abound in my neighborhood, and the allergy-related headaches have reared their ugly head (har-dee-har-har). This also means that it's time for me to get my gardening started, which I did yesterday. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, and I figured that was the perfect time for me to get my herbs planted.
Clockwise from top left, that's basil (two packets -- I accidentally overbought), fennel, chives, lavender, and snapdragons (not an herb, but I had a packet of seeds from my Grandmother and an extra pot -- I figured "What the Hell?"). I couldn't find any mint seeds, but I did find an already-sprouted plant at the Sunflower Market, so that's on my kitchen windowsill already being enjoyed.

I tried to grow herbs last summer in Houston -- I had basil and chives. The basil had started to sprout, but they hadn't quite gotten big enough to enjoy by the time we moved. I have the feeling the searing heat and the never-ending mushrooms sprouting up probably stunted their growth anyway (the chives never even sprouted). Here's hoping I see some greeniness in the next couple or few weeks!

My knitting is still stitching along. The super secret project that I'm test-knitting for Y2Knit has been started and I'm making good progress, but I still won't post any photos of that until the pattern has been published. I CAN tell you in the meantime that the yarn I was sent to make this project is quite lovely to work with. That's Laramie, from Mountain Meadow Wool and it's a lovely 100% Merino. Because of the way the yarn is milled and spun, there is still some vegetable matter embedded in it, and I get little pills as I knit along. All that means is that the yarn wasn't processed within an inch of it's life before it was spun up at the mill. The vegetable matter is usually removed when the yarn is picked or combed through to remove that type of thing; the small pills are because the shorter fibers were not removed during the same process. The only downside (in my humble opinion) about this type of processing is that it leaves it with less-than-perfect stitch definition -- which is really only an issue depending on the type of project you're knitting up. The yarn is really lovely to knit with and I think this project will come out quite nice, if I do say so myself.

In the next couple or few weeks, it will probably be warm enough for me to plant my vegetables. I haven't gone shopping for these plants yet, so more on that when it actually happens. But I am planning to at least have tomatoes and bell peppers, and perhaps also some green beans.